Opinion Brief: Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by the National Association of Career Colleges (NACC). Our Board is meeting in Ottawa this week. NACC has been waiting since 2010 for Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) to stop discrimination against small and medium-sized businesses trying to create jobs in our communities.

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Good evening, subscribers. Winston Churchill gave good rhetoric. But it takes more than rhetoric to be ‘Churchillian’. For starters, it helps to actually match words to actions.

Tonight, former Canadian ambassador to Russia Chris Westdal delivers a blistering piece on the vast gap between Stephen Harper’s warlike language and his real-world record on the security file — specifically his reluctance to equip Canada’s military to actually fight wars, while undermining the diplomatic tools we use to stop them. “If Vladimir Putin is the 21st century’s answer to Adolf Hitler, why did Mr. Harper lead the opposition at NATO’s Wales summit against a U.S./UK pitch for a boost in defence spending? If the world is, quite suddenly, such a dangerous place, why is our defence budget so modest? Why is our weapon procurement process such a disaster?”

Of course, when you control the language of debate, you can define success in any way that suits. Geoff Hall says the Harper government is offering Canadians a highly politicized image of terrorism that, in many ways, contradicts its own policy statements. “We’re told we need special security powers with a minimum of legislative oversight to combat terrorism — yet the problem of hundreds of aboriginal women and girls vanishing or being murdered can, we’re assured, be dealt with under the laws we have now.”

Steve Sullivan says the Harper government is cooking up a crisis in the nation’s prison system through its zealous embrace of punishment as the only sentencing principle that matters. “Some of the budget cuts are downright petty. Why, for instance, cut $6 million from Corrections Canada’s food budget? Stupid question, maybe: $6 million buys the government a lot of Economic Action Plan ads during the playoffs. Who gets credit for feeding convicts?”

And speaking of the politics of dysfunction, here’s Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein on why Republicans don’t seem to care if the American government actually works anymore. “The Republican Party (along with its attached lucrative conservative marketplace) has few incentives for governing. It would rather pose as an aggrieved, oppressed minority — even when it controls Congress.”